The Valiant is an Early Contender for Comic Event of the Year

Valiant

With the aptly titled The Valiant, Valiant Comics is doing something special: they are mastering the rarely seen self-contained Event comic. It feels appropriate that this title is running at the same time Marvel and DC are prepping for Secret Wars and Convergence, the biggest Event comics to come from the Big Two in the last three years. These story lines will effect both companies' entire publishing lines. Secret Wars and Convergence are going to be unavoidable to Marvel and DC fans this spring and summer. The Event comic and its seemingly endless number of tie-ins and cross-overs is smart business, but alienating to a vocal portion of comic book readers, myself included in that group. I don't like feeling obligated to buy more comics than I already do just to collect the entirety of story lines that I'm forced to read, not ones I necessarily want to. Most often, my favourite comics from Marvel and DC are the smaller, weirder, self contained titles. This is because they often keep to themselves and tell an uninterrupted story with a clear beginning, middle and end [see: She Hulk (2014-2015)].

Valiant has done their share of traditional Event stories as well: Harbinger Wars crossed over into Harbinger and Bloodshot in the summer of 2013; Armor Hunters crossed over into X-O Manowar and Unity in the summer of 2014. Their new series, The Valiant, is taking a different approach. Like Harbinger Wars and Armor Hunters, it aims to tell a narrative of epic proportions. It has a large all-star cast of Valiant's biggest heroes: Eternal Warrior, Bloodshot, Ninjak, Geomancer, Armstrong, X-O Manowar and more. What's so bold about the series is that it's as big in scope as it is small in page count. Zero cross-over, zero tie-in miniseries; The Valiant will tell its game changing, universe altering story in four issues and four issues alone (roughly 88 pages of comic).

Valiant

 

So accessible in-so-far that The Valiant also works as a jumping on point for new readers, it doesn't repel potential fans with endless exposition or rely heavily on prior known context to grasp this story. The story here is constantly in motion, and while it is probably a bit of a hyperbole to say, in the cause of The Valiant it is true: this comic doesn't waste a single panel. Jeff Lemire, Matt Kindt, and Paolo Rivera are masters of gravitas through brevity.

The story's opening 11 pages traces centuries in the life of Gilad, the Eternal Warrior; in particular, his greatest failures, and confrontations with the Immortal Enemy. Right away, Immortal Enemy is established as the greatest foe that Gilad's ever faced; we've never seen him been so utterly defeated and humiliated in his previous series Eternal Warrior and Eternal Warrior: Days of Steel, like we have here. The encounters with the Immortal Enemy all end in bloodshed, and we're revealed the origin of Gilard's trio of facial scars. The two page spread ending this section of the comic is a haunting summation of the previous nine pages and is Rivera's finest composition of the first issue. In the foreground we have a full body shot of Gilad, clothes tattered, weakened and beaten, dragging his feet through the snow; carrying the weight of massive failure. In the background there are three wide panels running horizontal, each one depicting the battlefield of his three encounters with the Immortal Enemy; dead bodies populating every one. The panels are divided by slashes, symbolizing the three scars he obtained at the end of each defeat, which he wears on his face as a constant reminder of the lives he was unable to protect.

Valiant

 

Another character given spotlight in issue one is Geomancer, a relative newcomer to the Valiant Universe, a woman who has only recently discovered her powers and still unsure of her path in life. Her two page introduction is comprised of 12 panels, one establishing the scene and her relationship with the space around her, followed by 11 close-ups. She's staring toward (though not directly at; this isn't breaking the fourth wall) the reader of the comic; opening up to an unseen friend (revealed to be Armstrong), and explaining her situation. It's exposition, and tells the reader everything they need to know about her, but it is presented as a confessional, and is channeled through the character's emotional state, presenting itself as character building rather than obligatory plot fillings. Paolo Rivera had to draw 12 consecutive panels of Geomancer (11 close-ups), and each one is different from the rest. Her facial and body language is constantly shifting as she tells her story, the expression on her face never the same across two panels. Her eyebrows moving from one extreme to another, slouching in her chair to moments of adjusting upward, talking with her hands and running her hands through her hair in frustration. It's a wonderful two page display of acting in comics, and an example of when an artist has a full grasp on a character's emotional state and knows exactly how to articulate it.

Valiant

 

The first issue jumps from Eternal Warrior to Geomancer and then to Bloodshot, the super soldier created by Project Rising Spirit but who now battles them with the help of the Unity supergroup. We see him being parachuted into an undisclosed jungle in the Pacific Rim, guns a blazing. In an action packed sequence featuring Bloodshot running away from a heavily armed drone machine, the comic's second two page spread has a lovely little moment in its creative placement of its sound effects text. Sound effects text in a comic is a tricky thing to pull off, and when treated as an after-thought, or a cheat, can distract from a scene, and even drown out the surrounding drawing. Rivera avoids these pratfalls, and does something cool with sound effects, by inserting the TAT-AT-ATAT blocks firmly on the ground, with grass visible both in front of and behind the text. As Bloodshot is fleeing the scene, he has one leg over the text, and another behind. The sound effects text is a physical entity in this sequence, and while it's a subtle touch, it's a fun visual display of something that can only happen in this medium.

Valiant's prestige-format four issue miniseries has two issues still unreleased, coming out February 18^th and March 25^th. The series continues to integrate more characters and more corners of the Universe with each passing issue. It hints at altering the landscape of the universe and it will be interesting to see how the series affects the rest of the Valiant Universe throughout 2015, but I'm even more excited to see what Lemire, Kindt and Rivera have in store for the final issues. The Valiant's first issues have been perfect, and this could end up being one of my favourite titles of the entire year.